The Ralstons

by F. Marion Crawford

“Yes—but I just caught the train—I wouldn’t do it at all, if I could help it, you know.”

“Of course not—I mustn’t be selfish. Run, dear—and good-bye!”

In a moment he was gone. She watched his wiry, elastic movements as he ran at the top of his speed towards the station of the elevated, to the vicinity of which they had directed their walk while they had been talking. As he disappeared, flying up the covered iron stairs, two steps at a time, she turned and walked briskly homeward. The neighbourhood is a safe and quiet one, though it is largely inhabited by foreigners, but she did not care to slacken her pace till she got back to Washington Square. Then she moved more slowly.

The spring was in the air and the sun was bright. She sauntered leisurely through the walks, wondering what the coming summer was to bring forth for her, and all the months after people began to go away. And she thought all the time of Ralston. It seemed such an absurd and senseless thing that they two, who were to be one day among the richest, and would be masters of all that the world can give to people not endowed with what is not in the world’s gift or market—that they two, being lawfully and christianly married, should be forced to meet by stealth for a few moments, to be separated again almost immediately by the necessity which drove John every day to his desk as a junior clerk in Mr. Beman’s employment. A week—a year—ten years, if uncle Robert lived so long—and then, if John went into the bank, the clerks, who were all his seniors, would lift their pens from the paper in the middle of a word to watch the representative of so much wealth go by. And old Mr. Beman would rise from his seat and offer Twenty-Five Millions a chair, as though he were a man of years and weight. Not but that the Bemans and John’s fellow-clerks, some of whom were acquaintances in his own world and beginning their life as he was, were all well aware that he had a good chance of getting something handsome in the end. But mere potential wealth is too common in the neighbourhood of Wall Street to be noticed or much respected. It is not the man who may have it, but the man who has it, who commands respect. Even the only son, the man who is sure to get it if he lives, is treated with a certain indifference. But when time has brought down his heavy hand upon the millionaire, and crushed him into the earth-darkness and his memory into a bit of stone with his name on it, when the last well-greased screw has been run into the polished coffin, when the black horses have waved their black plumes and the last carriage that followed the funeral is being washed down in the coach-house yard—then the man who is next stops, and lets future run ahead of him and himself becomes present fact, strong, gorgeous, worshipful. For at his mighty nod the wilderness may become real estate, or the secret places of Nassau Street and Exchange Place may be hideous with the groaning of the bulls he has beared out of the ring—and the solid security may to-morrow be wild-cat if he wills it, and the wild-cat emerge in the dawn with a gilt edge and an honest countenance, to be a joyful investment for the widow’s mite.

Meanwhile, Jack was nobody down town. His cousin Hamilton Bright, who was a junior partner in Beman Brothers’, was a vastly more important person than he. For he had behind him what Ralston had before him, and a fair amount of capital in the present, besides. It was all very ridiculous, Katharine thought, and depended on the false state of society in which she was obliged to live.

She thought bitterly of her father. He was a prominent figure in that false state—a man of fine principles and opportunist practice—she had caught the latter expression from Walter Crowdie, Bright’s brother-in-law, the well-known painter, who had painted a portrait of her during the winter, and who, as the husband of a distant cousin, was counted in the Lauderdale tribe.

Her father, she thought, preached, prayed—and then acted far worse than average people who prayed little and sat still to be preached at on Sundays, in order that Providence might have a sort of weekly photograph of their souls, so to say, and because others did the same and it was expected of them. She and her father had never agreed very well, and had come into open conflict about John Ralston; but hitherto she had respected him for his uncompromising, unashamed piety. There had seemed to her to be something masculine and bold about it, and such as it was, she had believed in it. It had been far from being an idol, but it had been a very creditable statue, so to say, and now, on a sudden, the head had been knocked off it, and she saw, or thought she saw, that it was hollow and a sham. She was too young yet to admit the presence of good in the same place with evil, and the evil itself had been thrown directly in her path as a stumbling-block for herself, and in the hope that she might fall over it.

And as though it were not enough to torment her perpetually with questions, there was that other thing which she had just concealed from John, because he had been so angry about the first. Her father and mother were apparently determined that she should be married before the summer was out, and were thrusting a match upon her in a way of which she would not have believed them capable. Ever since her mother had discovered that she was losing her beauty and that Katharine received three-fourths of all the admiration which had once been hers, the relations of the two had been changed. Mrs. Lauderdale was constantly between two conflicting emotions, which almost amounted to passions,—her real affection for Katharine, and her detestable envy of the girl’s freshness and youth. She was a good woman, and she despised herself more than any one else could possibly have despised her, for wishing that she might not be daily compared with her, handicapped, as she was, with nearly twenty years more to carry. To marry her daughter was to remove her from home, and perhaps from New York—and with her, to do away with the foundation of envy, the cause of the offence, the visible temptation to the sin which was destroying the elder woman’s happiness and undermining her peace of mind. Mrs. Lauderdale, whose sins had hitherto been few and pardonable, felt that if Katharine were once away, she should become again a good woman, and find courage to bear the terrible loss of her once supreme beauty.

For she was keenly alive to the wickedness of what she felt, though she could not quite understand it. No man could boast that he had ever had a meaning look or an over-sympathetic pressure of the hand from Mrs. Lauderdale, during the five and twenty years of her married life, though she had loved society intensely, and enjoyed its amusements with a real innocence of which not every woman in her position would have been capable. But no man who had laid eyes upon her could boast—and it would have been a poor boast—that he had turned away at the first glance, without looking again and wondering at her loveliness, and saying to himself that Mrs. Lauderdale was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

It hurt her bodily to miss those eyes turned upon her from all sides, as she began to miss them now. It hurt her still more—and in spite of secret prayers and solemn resolutions and litanies of self-contempt, she turned pale with quiet, deadly anger against the world—when, as she entered a crowded room with Katharine, she felt, as well as saw, that those same eyes sought the pale, severe face of the dark-haired young girl, and overlooked her own fading perfection. The stately rose was drooping, just as the sweet white summer myrtle burst the bud.